Iain Sinclair - Downriver

It was only with the switch to the branch line, the plunge into the Whitechapel burrow, that the old fears returned. Every night, without fail, a red beast, a kind of deer, stood waiting for him on the curve. He did not touch the brake, but always drove straight on — at it and through it. He would not allow the creature’s presence (or its meaning) to trouble him. His cab was monitored: if the central computer showed him slowing, anywhere, he would be surrounded in seconds by balaclava’d security-men, armed snatch-squads eager to redefine the ‘rules of engagement’. He would be rapidly converted to an unemployment statistic — waiting for his number to be called in some linoleum-carpeted retirement home; doped to the eyeballs, nodding through a remorseless procession of soap operas and advertisements; wetting himself.

Cec knew there was no living deer: no animal had been reported going over the fence from Victoria Park. The animal was a two-dimensional cartoon; lurid, sticky with varnish. It was the Roebuck of Brady Street, moonlighting from its pub-sign pasture. Now, apparently, even this mild territorial guardian was infected with panic, and obliged to understudy its own apocalypse. One of these days, Cec decided, he would confront his fear — go down the Roebuck, order a drink, sit with the Irish and the Maltese, talk about car auctions.

What did the quacks know anyway? Giving him placebos, coloured smarties, like some kid — pretending that would cure him. ‘See how you go. Come back in a month, Mr Whitenettle. We can adjust the prescription.’ Was it reasonable ? Who would want to achieve marital intimacy when the whole world was dying? Do apes hump in their cages? Not bleeding likely: they wank themselves stupid. Cec had read all the relevant stuff himself, down the library. Transient Global Amnesia, Automatism, Psycho-motor Epilepsy : your hands can never break free from the controls because they are part of a circuit. A single fracture will destroy it all, lay waste the landscape. The power is in the machine. We have only to hang on, put all our trust in its deeper wisdom.

The roebuck is waiting for him. ‘Hold up, you fucking Bambi. I’ll have you.’ The creature, for the first time, faces the train — head on: gone rogue, its eyes full of blood. Cec cannot break his grip. The harder he strains, the more power he releases. The engine bucks, leaps, rears. The track hisses like a punctured hose, heats to orange-white: the rails open like the ribs of a clattered Buddha. They are liquid spears of rage. Cec starts to laugh. It hurts his stiffened face. He is a jockey, a monkey mounted on a mad dog. It is no longer his affair. Let the train jump its brook; let it tumble down the perilous chasm between the banked windows of the hospital, with all its revenging monsters, and the eternally poisoned site of the first sacrificial murder.

Rattles the crossing: nothing now will halt the fire lizard. It will bury itself, beyond sight, on the far side of the buffers, the sand traps, in a dead-end tunnel: a drain for anguish. Excused by the formal density of madness, Cec lies on his back, smiling: the stones of London are his heaven, and they move. They slide. He will excavate remote sources of darkness. He is redundant, the train needs him no further: it will travel on, through yellow clay and blue rock, ferrying the solemn dead in search of incorruptible rivers.

X

Tattered and exhausted, Arthur Singleton, haunter of stations, prisoner of White Chappell, planned his escape from the treadmill of time. The field of his ‘life force’ was too weak to interest the cameras: undetected, he hooked his rope over the crossbar of the gantry that supported this spy system. Like a first-plunge swimmer, he lay groaning; then edged forward, ready to lower himself into the shallow abyss. One foot clung to the platform, the other searched for the neck of the roebuck. It was foretold: only the Triple Death of Llew Llaw Gyffes could release him.

From the deep pocket of his moss-stained overall Arthur drew out Count Jerzy’s massive service revolver, stolen this night from behind the bar of The Spear of Destiny. Its cold barrel, greased and foreign, was inserted in a toothless mouth. He would pull the trigger at the moment of impact. As the train tossed him into the air, so would the rope from the gantry snap his neck; flying, he would squeeze his finger, in a come-hither reflex, spilling his brains into the night — like stars. The unwitnessed silence of his act would stand in place of Llew Llaw’s ‘terrible scream’. The falling gunge and the smoking pink cap would be one; an eagle in the dark. Arthur would, at last, get out from under the responsibility of myth. He would be nothing, nameless; unrequired .

The eye of the rapidly approaching monster filled the tunnel: it was scarlet, a steppewolf dribbling fire. It pawed the ground. Arthur knew that the engine was no machine, but a living thing. It was cloaked in vegetation, it was alive; rich with green leaves and secret veins. It was fruiting, streams of clear water ran from its side. The engine had transcended speed, arriving before it was understood: a torrent of fruitfulness, challenging wrath, carrying life and birth, deserts, storms; the jaguar and the stone. The ancient rubbled fields were scorched by a path of new light.

Arthur, in that instant, glimpsed his vanished river: it was unchanged. He did what never can be done, he stepped into it for the second time.

One morning… the newspapers loud with her praise, the Sun in its heaven, banked television monitors floating a cerulean image-wash, soothing and silent, streamlets of broken Wedgwood crockery, satellite bin lids flinging back some small reflection of the blue virtue she had copyrighted, filmy underwear of sky goddesses, clouds of unknowing… the Widow rose from her stiff pillows — bald as Mussolini — and felt the twitch start in her left eyelid. She ordained the immediate extermination of this muscular anarchy, this palace revolt: but without success. She buzzed for the valet of the bedchamber, a smiler in hornrims. He entered the presence with a deferential smirk, hands behind back (like a defeated Argie conscript), bowing from the hip: he was half a stone overweight, creaking with starch, and greedy for preferment. He disconnected the ‘sleep-learning’ gizmo, the tapes that fed the Widow her Japanese humour, taught the finer points of cheating at stud poker, and provided an adequate form forecast to the current camel-racing season. She was a brand leader, she did not sleep. ‘A’ brand leader? The leader, the longest serving politico-spiritual Papa Boss not yet given the wax treatment, and planted in a glass box to receive the mercifully filtered kisses of a grateful populace.

The golden curls were sprung and twisted, lacquered into their proper place. The valet held up the wig for her approval. She made her choice from a cabinet of warriors’ teeth, toying between the chew-’em-up-and-spit-out-the-pips version and the infinitely more alarming smile-them-to-death set that the boffins never quite managed to synchronize with her eye-language. The Widow was a praise-fed avatar of the robot-Maria from Metropolis ; she looked like herself, but too much so. The ‘blend of Wagner and Krupp’ (in Siegfried Kracauer’s memorable phrase) had suffered a meltdown: it was gonzo, dangerous to its living soul and the souls of all other life-forms. She was a prisoner of the rituals she alone had initiated. If she ever appeared in her original skin the underclass would riot and tear her to pieces. And so she suffered the stinking baths of electrified Ganges mud (bubbling like Malcolm Lowry’s breakfast), the horse-sized ‘hormone replacement’ shots. Even now the lab boys were grinding a fresh consignment of monkey testicles in the mixer. The eyedrops, the powder, the paint: she censored the morning radio bulletins. Not a breath of criticism, nor a whisper of forbidden names: all was analgesic ‘balance’, the cancellation of energy. Muzak for the hospitalized, garden notes for the dying. Jollity was unconfined; house-broken ‘rogues with a brogue’ winked and blarneyed, and sold. But something was not right.